Deborah Hurst

• Athabasca University

Athabasca University's Faculty of Business (AU-FB) has introduced a new virtual co-operative program to provide targeted work experience. The virtual co-op responds in part to the charge that new university graduates lack work-readiness and the needed professional soft skills to succeed in workplaces, as well as the reduction in onsite work placeme...

Increasingly, employers state that university graduates are not “work ready” meaning graduates do not possess the combined academic disciplinary knowledge and professional skills needed in the workplace. Such include strong communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, continuous learning and creative problem-solving. Though educators attempt...

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) examines university programs on four themes: academic challenge, learning with peers, experiences with faculty, and campus environment. We examine NSSE’s commonly accepted indicators of student engagement on these four themes using Athabasca University Faculty of Business (AUFB) online graduate progr...

This book presents different perspectives of online business education - how it is designed, delivered and how it supports advances in management disciplines. The authors describe online platforms in their provision of timely, excellent and relevant business education. The book starts by examining the emergence of online business education. It offe...

While many online graduate students are gaining academic and scholarly knowledge, the opportunities for students to develop and hone professional skills essential for the workplace are lacking. Given the virtual environment of distance learning, graduate students are often expected to glean professional skills such as analytical thinking, self-awar...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a training program for developing the self-discovery and self-regulation competencies of international students. The paper combines literature review from global leadership, international education and related disciplines to advance a competency-based program that addresses a critical need for greater integ...

Graduate students are assumed to develop skills in oral and written communication and collegial relationships that are complementary to formal graduate programs. However, it appears only a small number of universities provide such professional development opportunities alongside academic programs, and even fewer do so online. There appears to be an...

Graduate students are assumed to develop skills in oral and written communication and collegial relationships that are complementary to formal graduate programs. However, it appears only a small number of universitites provide such professional development opportunities alongside academic programs, and even fewer do so online. There appears to be a...

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and industry-driven approach to measure required competencies of business graduates. The suggested approach was designed and tested within a project implemented in Austria, the UK, Slovenia and Romania. Evidence from this multi-country study of employers and business graduates suggests that it is possible t...

Queries into the creation of collective meaning through social processes arise in both organization culture and institutional theory. This paper applies DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) three isomorphic processes (mimetic, normative and coercive) from institutional theory to re‐think how structural and dynamic aspects of culture become nested, taken‐fo...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare knowledge employees' perceptions of contingent work with their managers' perceptions, highlighting potential differences in their respective psychological contracts which might produce dissonance in the employment relationship. Design/methodology/approach – Original research using interviews and sc...

Purpose While there is no definitive profile of the successful entrepreneur or prescribed pathway for success, research suggests that individuals who proactively accommodate factors that push and pull them into entrepreneurship, align their personal and entrepreneurial visions, and to some extent, build emotional intelligence (EQ), are more likely...

Knowledge-intensive businesses in the fast-moving high technology sector are highly dependent upon the creation and transfer of knowledge among skilled employees. Ironically, this critical feature of organizational success resides with employees who tend to be somewhat transient, given the high demand for their knowledge and their own autonomy, cre...

Purpose The use of contingent knowledge workers may be an efficient means of investing in an organization's intellectual capital. However, exposing contingent workers to private, key competitive knowledge is considered risky. A study was undertaken to collect the costs, benefits and losses experienced by organizations that had contracted contingent...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 1996. Includes bibliographical references.